Lee Mack

Lee Mack has a new stand-up DVD out but this older show from 2006 is much better - a breathlessly funny bundle of razor-sharp one-liners and tall stories that harks back to the cheery old days of Eric Morecambe yet still feels bang up to date. Filmed at London's Bloomsbury Theatre.

Not Going Out - BBC1, 9.30pm

The last episode in the current series finds Lee Mack inventing a whole new genre: the sitcoma.

Have You Been Watching... Not Going Out?

Lee Mack's sitcom is a crowd-pleaser with integrity - and this series is even more joyously silly than the previous three.

Leading up to the British Comedy Awards, Comic's Choice invited five celebrated comedians - Alan Davies, Sean Lock, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes, Lee Mack - to choose a shortlist and winner from among their own personal past favourites. Bill Bailey played affable host, something he does effortlessly.

Forgetting for one moment the universally acknowledged truth that no comic truly enjoys any laughter they haven't themselves produced, the show's premise was flimsy in the extreme. Not to mention confusing - Alan Davies nominated Chris Morris as Best Breakthrough Act for work done in 1994.

Davies also took part in a film recreation of an unsuccessful audition he once attended, as gratuitous a piece of padding as I have seen in a long time. This lack of coherence was reflected in the meaningless studio set design which threw together leather armchairs, old boilers, stuffed elk heads and bicycles combined to create the effect of a gentleman's club located in a garage.

Basically Comic's Choice was yet another excuse to disinter old archive clips instead of producing fresh comedy. Although, having said that, the archive clips were rather excellent, so I'm not complaining too loudly.

When actors talk warmly about other actors who inspired them, the results are embarrassing, as a rule. But the same doesn't apply to comedians, for some reason: get them talking about other comics and the results can be tart, revealing and funny. That's the idea here as part of the extra hoo-ha that Channel 4 is drumming up around next week's British Comedy Awards. The idea is that Bill Bailey chats to a different comedian each night about his or her comedy heroes. What are their all-time favourite shows and which comedian would they give their own personal award to? Bailey begins with selections from Alan Davies - always smarter than he pretends to be - and later in the week there's hero worship from Lee Mack, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes and Sean Lock.

As the British Comedy Awards gets a revamp and moves to Channel 4 from ITV, Bill presents five companion shows in the week running up to the big event, on Saturday. In each he interviews a top British comedian about their comic likes and dislikes. First it's Alan Davies, with Lee Mack, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes and Sean Lock to follow on consecutive nights.

Lee Mack: I'm bothered by the existence of Twitter

Lee Mack talks about Not Going Out and why he's bothered about the existence of Twitter.

Not Going Out series 4 episode 1 review

Lee Mack and Tim Vine return in the first episode of Not Going Out since its reprieve from the axe. And the show is on very, very good form...

"Fast-moving" is somehow still too slow a phrase to describe Not Going Out, a sitcom that doesn't physically move much further than a similar flat-based show like Johnny Vegas's Ideal, but does so at three or four times the rate. Lee Mack writes and stars as displaced Lee in the flatshare comedy, where tonight things take a potentially sinister turn when Tim returns from a work do with a pocketful of a suspicious powder. Not a lot of soul, but plenty of what US comedy writers call "yucks", so it's worth checking out if you haven't yet.